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February 17, 2012

Awesomeness February 2012 !

Hello hello ! What's been happening here you ask? I'm sure everyone heard about the deep freeze that engulfed Europe last few weeks, well it happened in good old Rotterdam too. Luckily for us that it wasn't as severe as most northern European countries. Ours did reach a minimum of -17c, I couldn't even feel my face and after about 10 minutes of being outside, my mouth was frozen in place !!!

But we had an amazing experience. The Netherlands is rigged with canals and lakes that flow from the open sea into the city's and towns, and I happen to live right in front of a canal. Temperatures were hovering around 0c then suddenly it began to snow. It snowed for a solid 3 hours and by that time everything had turned completely white. I sat by my window watching Dong Yi, watching it happened the whole time :-)

The kids and mommy had so much fun that day throwing snowballs after school ! I then started noticing people on the canals, clearing away the snow and wondering what they were doing, then suddenly they started skating and tobogganing !! Well, what do you expect, I took the kids out and we were sliding around with our shoes :-) Saturday, (I got so jealous watching my neighbors zoming around ) we went out to get ice skates ( they were selling like hot cakes !) and we started skating on our canal. It was so festive like a huge party, everyone was out skating and in spite of the cold it was amazing! Everyone was laughing and having a good time. My boys within a few minutes were skating like pros, so irritating to the mommy who was waddling around like a duck !!

Well, here are 2 short video snaps , one on our canal and another on a lake near my house. We skated for a full week ( I didn't fall down once :-) ) and then on the Monday, temperatures went back up to 4c and the snow melted and the ice thawed, our skates are now down in the basement hopefully waiting to come out next year :-)